Differential neural activation to friends and strangers links interdependence to empathy

Two competing views implicate interdependence in empathy. One suggests that interdependence may generally enhance empathy (Woltin et al., British Journal of Social Psychology 50:553–562, 2011), whereas another suggests that interdependence enhances empathy for targets with whom one is in a relationship, at the cost of decreasing empathy for strangers (Markus and Kitayama, Perspectives on Psychological Science 5(4):420–430, 2010). Here, we show evidence in support of the latter account. We observed that trait-level interdependence positively correlated with trait-level empathic abilities in perspective-taking and empathic concern. However, empathy for social exclusion paradigm, we found that neural responses to a friend’s compared to a stranger’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion) differentially related to interdependence, perspective-taking and empathic concern. During the observation of a friend’s social exclusion (vs. inclusion), neural responses in the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), and to a lesser M. L. Meyer (&) ! C. L. Masten ! N. I. Eisenberger ! M. D. Lieberman UCLA Psychology Department, 1285 Franz Hall, Box 951563, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1563, USA e-mail: [email protected] Y. Ma Lieber Institute for Brain Development, Baltimore, USA C. Wang ! S. Han PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing, People’s Republic of China Z. Shi The Annenberg Public Policy Center, University of Pennsylvania, 202 S. 36th Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104-3806, USA S. Han (&) Department of Psychology, Peking University, 5 Yiheyuan Road, Beijing 100871, People’s Republic of China e-mail: [email protected] 123 Cult. Brain DOI 10.1007/s40167-014-0023-7